HOW SHALL I LOVE YOU, MY LITTLE NEW ONE?

NILC / Miguel Ventura
2005

ATOMIC EYE / ANTIMUSEO

25 Mantuano street, Madrid

2003-2007

NILC (New Interterritorial Language Committee) is a fictitious institution created by Miguel Ventura for the conception, diffusion and imposition of a new linguistic system. NILC was inspired by the East African Interterritorial Language Committee, or ILC, which from the 1930s to the 1960s was devoted to the standardization of African languages, particularly Swahili, which it endowed with spelling, grammar and vocabulary based on European systems. NILC is a caricature of some groups' arrogant contempt for the oppressed and the subjugation and virtual rape of an entire culture through the appropriation of its language. NILC embodies the obsession that totalitarian regimes have with power and control and the dream of creating a "new man." At the center of NILC is Heidi Schreber, an idealized Aryan girl whose golden braids twist into designs that form the basis for the thirty glyphs in the New Universal Language.
Miguel Ventura works with narrative structures, interwoven stories presented in different media, including video, photography, installation and books. The piece presented at the Ojo Atómico, How Shall I Love You, My New Little One?¸ tells the story of a patient, represented by the artist himself, who seeks help from a child psychiatrist to overcome his weakness and transform his pathology into something useful for post-revolutionary society. The healing process involves the consumption of thirty cookies in the form of the thirty glyphs—apparently made of excrement—which will impregnate the patient with the new language.
The society created by NILC is a kind of brave new world full of paternalistic myths. A society of State-approved and -imposed pseudo-scientific dogmas. It is yet another fantasy of social engineering that has been perverted, but in which control and power are not achieved by force but rather—as in Orwell's 1984—by means of the creation of a new reality through the manipulation of language. Miguel Ventura has created a strange nightmare that obsessively reflects our globalized world.